from the edge of the deep green sea

I had written this post way back and forgot to publish it. I’ve had previous issues with my hosting company and this one pretty much was the last one. Ever since, I switched to Media Temple and they have been extremely reliable with the best support I’ve had.

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Isn’t it funny how we ignore common proverbs and sayings because they simply “don’t apply to us”? Well, right now I wish I could kick myself for not paying attention to the old saying:

“you get what you pay for”.

To make this sour story short, I have a hosting account with LunarPages (LP), which works for as long as you don’t need support from them. I recently opened a new account for hosting ASP.Net web pages and found that LP’s control panel was a pain to use. I contacted support and requested for this service to be removed.

Today I wake up and find this on my inbox:

This email is to confirm that your hosting account with Lunarpages has been deleted.

Whaaaaaaaaaaaat? I then opened my browser and started visiting all the domains that I currently host with LP. Down. Down. Down. Down. These guys had deleted the account which had about 20 domains, and all of them were down.

After managing to speak to a customer service rep, I was pretty much told that this was my fault because I did not specify which account I was referring to, which leads me to 2 things:

1. This was pretty much kind of obvious since the message came from a thread where I was having issues with the ASP.Net account.
2. If they were in doubt, they should have asked.

Regardless, I asked how quickly they could get things back up and I was told that “in a couple of hours everything should be fine”. Well, 4 hours and 3 additional tech support calls have passed (each of these calls outs you on hold for good 20 minutes or so) and my sites are still not online.

I am on my fourth call and I have already in the meantime opened an account with MediaTemple, which I will immediately switch all accounts.

This experience has taught me valuable lessons:

1. You can’t expect good support with cheap hosting companies.
2. The techs of these accounts in no way friendly, and each tech you speak with creates a new problem because they don’t care what the previous tech did to alleviate the problem.
3. Your issues with cheap hosting companies will not be resolved quickly, be ready to hold 20-30 minutes on the phone for them to pick up.

The last tech support call pretty much deleted ALL my sites and I am calling to restore them, but I don’t know if this will be possible. I have backups for most all published sites, but still, this should have never happened in the first place.

So please, think twice if you decide to go the ‘cheap’ way with hosting companies such as LunarPages. Think how valuable your time is and how pissed off your customers will be when you can’t resolve hosting problems because of your hosting companies incompetence.